Graphing Frenzy

So we have this Research Skills and Report Writ­ing sub­ject this semes­ter which require us to con­duct sur­veys and pen a 2,000-word-minimum report.

Its kinda like your SPM’s BM paper two where they ask you to write a sum­mary based on some table or chart of sta­tis­tics. Only this time, you gather the sta­tis­tics, painstak­ingly tab­u­late them, draw tons and tons of graphs, pie charts, tables and what­not, and write a sum­mary on every-freakin-graph. Then you’d have to dis­cuss the data, draw obvi­ous con­clu­sions and cook up a few lame recommendations.

Worst of all, it’s due next week. Bum­mer.

I teamed up with Ah Wu and worked on student’s lap­top own­er­ship and use, a rather spur-of-the moment choice of a topic, you see.

Laptop ownership research graph 1

Despite the stress­ful and brainjuice-draining efforts to think of a thou­sand and one dif­fer­ent ways to inter­pret a graph, the find­ings are some­what inter­est­ing to look at. Through the graph above, for exam­ple, you’ll see that 63% of Swin­burne stu­dents actu­ally own a laptop.

Rich bas­tards.

Well nev­er­mind that, that per­cent­age could be way higher in your cam­pus but take a look at this:

Laptop ownership research graph 2

We got our hands on stun­ning results on how Swin­bur­nites use their lap­tops. Online research and com­plet­ing assign­ments are actu­ally the high­est in fre­quency (notice how dis­hon­est hard­work­ing we males are!). But what caught me head-scratching was how ‘Gam­ing’, ‘Chat­ting’ and ‘Watch­ing movies’ sank to the very depths of the scales.

If it were my graph of per­cent­age of time against that list of activ­i­ties, it’ll be an exact copy of that graph above — only rotated a hun­dred and eighty degrees.

I’m dif­fer­ent.

Be afraid. Very, afraid.

——-

Thing is, I’ve been work­ing on graphs every­day for the past week, I see graphs in everything.

I call it, the Grapho­holic syndrome.

Dur­ing last night’s tuto­r­ial, our Engi­neer­ing Math test papers were returned. I looked at it, and a pie-chart mate­ri­alised above my head.

I hate pie charts

OMG.

13 thoughts on “Graphing Frenzy

  1. ember Post author

    @jacky, yeah been really busy. =( LOL. Actu­ally a ‘Porn’ cat­e­gory exists! See where the graph is cut off abruptly after ‘Watch­ing movies’? Hehehe.

    Seri­ously though, I would be chopped into pieces by my lec­turer before I could include any­thing even remotely resem­bling porn. =P

    @Harry, not so hilar­i­ous when the results agree with the pie chart. =P

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